First Glimpse of the 2012 Battle.net World Championship
Hot off the presses and fast on the heels of the recently announced 2012 Battle.net World Championship event set for later this year, Team Liquid took the time to interview Ilja Rotelli, director of global community and eSports at Blizzard Entertainment. The interview looks deeper into the new structure of the Battle.net World Championship and the future of Blizzard eSports. Here’s a brief snippet from the interview to whet your appetite.
At the national qualifier level, do you hope to hold some tournaments that are completely open to anyone who wants to compete?
Ilja Rotelli: That is precisely one of the design philosophies we originally adopted. The idea is that we want to make a more aspirational and participatory eSports environment for StarCraft. The idea that there are superstars that seem so far away, that one can't hope to become; this makes eSports very restrictive.
Blizzard has a slightly different goal from eSports companies. If you think very frankly about the business goal for Blizzard as a company, we gain when more people play the game, and a strategy that makes sense to achieve that goal is to go grassroots. We don't have plans in place yet, but in my dreams, this is the beginning, where we go as grassroots as we can for the first year. Then, in 2013, we would love to add an additional layer to the bottom of the structure, to be even more grassroots than now. This is just a philosophy, not a practical plan that we have in place, but certainly that is one of the design principles we have been using so far.
Visit the Team Liquid site to read the complete article.
Comments (16)
1. Lan. Although this won't happen, i think a special LAN version of the game should be released to approved tournaments. There are currently 3 series i can think of that have been won or lost by one match and had a disconnect in it that could have ultimately influenced the series.
2. In game tournaments. In wc3 there was awesome tournament functionality, etc.
3. A ladder pool with maps made by GSL, or at least more than just Tal Darim. The current ladder maps favor abusive TvP play and are in my opinion the reason protoss has trouble closing out the win in big tourneys. I play terran and i feel this way still.
4. Tournaments like this. It's good to see the game distributor putting in effort and time to make events like this. I love that this will be open to the public. This is a good move.
Like my post if you agree, maybe blizzard will read ^.^
A cool idea would be live streams of games. Within the game itself. As in, you launch Starcraft 2 and can watch live games as if you were watching a replay. You can watch the game as if you were in the game as a spectator. I love watching Tastosis/Day9 stream games but I think it would be waaaay cooler to look around the game yourself, view whatever tabs you like. Maybe have a togglable audio stream of casters to listen to while you look around the game.
Just my two cents...
Seriously Great IDEA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!